Ken Andler – Writer, Surveyor, Artist, Lawyer

Good boundaries make good neighbors. But the question is: how to make good boundaries? The problem of relocating property lines in northern New England is a troublesome one peculiar to this section.

The title to your land depends on your deed, and most deed descriptions in northern New England today, as for the last hundred years, are a combination of Alice in Wonderland, crystal gazing and a Boy Scout treasure hunt.

“Bounded on the North by Brother Jim, on the West by Brother Bill, on the South by Sister Sal, and on the East by Mother.”

One deed in Vermont reads “Bounded on the North by Brother Jim, on the West by Brother Bill, on the South by Sister Sal, and on the East by Mother.”

More definite is this one, “Commencing at a knot hole in the board fence, thence southerly to the middle of the well, thence westerly to the spot on the shore of the pond where the brown cow found the black calf, and so on around the lot.”

Another description starts from “a hole in the ice.” But where are the snows of yesteryear?

It is this sort of thing that turns a surveyor’s hair prematurely Gray. You look up the deeds of your abutters, and they bound their land by yours. And there you are- nowhere – and wondering where your land is.     

I started pulling a Gunter’s chain over the Vermont hills at the age of 14, and then worked with the survey parties for the International Paper Company in New Hampshire and Vermont. Boundary cases are often arising in my law practice, and it is my opinion that the average timberland owner knows less about his boundaries than he does about the League of Nations.

This is pretty bewildering to the city man who comes to buy a farm. He expects to be shown the boundaries, but as often as not the vendor merely gives a general wave of his hand at the horizon for one corner and murmurs something vague about another corner being Yonder by a Birch clump in the swamp. If the buyer takes a deed with no definite bounds, he is likely to learn that his hired man has been cutting off some neighbor Smith’s Woodlot.

When the early settlers moved into Newly granted townships. They surveyed the land into lots which they numbered and classified. Of course, these early surveys were rather slack and extremely generous, but on the whole solid and understandable. As time went on, people dropped the custom of conveying their lots by number, range and division with measurements, courses and definite corners, and began the hellish practice of describing a perfectly good line of North 10 degrees East, 160 rods as “the line against land of Bill Smith.”

Almost all deeds, fortunately, have been properly recorded, and when you can get back into the old ones, you can make progress. You must, however, supplement these by the Proprietors’ records, which give the definite measurements and courses of all the original lots, the town history and the old original map of the town if it hasn’t been lost.

In the woods, the difficulty of locating old bounds becomes even more painfully apparent. The ever-deepening forest is reclaiming large sections of northern New England. Old highways referred to in deeds by names unknown to us today are only gullied trails winding over the wooded hills between cellar holes, which stare bleakly at you through the trees.

Of many houses not even a rotten board remains. Back in the woods stand heaps of stones, mute testimony of a former mowing.     

In Stratton, Vermont, I have seen a graveyard from which two heavy crops of pulp wood have been cut. An old man there in 1921 told me of another cemetery in that town which was completely “lost”. The cellar holes of school houses, of town halls, of churches in the deep woods are all quiet with the awful silence of places where people have once lived. Several times while running lines in the forest, I have seen a scythe hung in the crotch of a tree – and the tree growing around it – hung there by some farmer who will return for it no more, who has himself vanished into the twilight of a story that is told.

Not only the growth of the woods but the cutting of them proves an obstacle to relocating old lines, for lumbermen show a magnificent disregard for marked line-trees. A line spotted through woods now slash is truly gone with the wind.

When the country was new, the early surveyors spotted lines well; that is, they plainly blazed the trees. Finding these old spots furnishes a thrill for the surveyor today but it is a highly specialized art and one not taught in engineering schools. The healing tree grows over these blazes until in time only a slight scar is discernible to the practiced eye.

That veteran woodsman and surveyor, A.D. Teare of Berlin, New Hampshire, now deceased, with whom I first worked, found and chopped out a spot in Marlow on one of the first lines ever run in New Hampshire -the old Masonian curved line. Of great historical interest, bounding the grant made to John Mason by the Council of Plymouth in 1629, it was not actually surveyed until 1751 when Joseph Blanchard, 21, started with his crew at the Province line, at what is now the southwest corner of Fitzwilliam and ran the famous curve into the wilderness. The Masonian line is now the boundary of 30 New Hampshire towns and three counties. As first run, it went to the West of Monadnock and Sunapee Mountains crossed Sunapee Lake at Great Island and so on to Newfound Lake.     

Two of Blanchard’s crew, Jonathan Farwell and John Kendall, would have been mighty pleased at a surveyor finding one of the old spots at this late date, for they were pretty put out by aspersions cast on their work, as may be seen by their deposition dated October 13, 1767 (New Hampshire State Papers, Vol. XXIX, Page 307)

There was really a crying need for accurate surveys of northern New England farm and timberland property. Chances for lawsuits multiply year by year. The appraisal for taxation can be no better than the boundaries of the land appraised and being slipshod, is unjust. Trespasses are common that could easily be avoided.

Maps should be made and recorded together with survey bills and future deeds drawn by them.

Maps should be made and recorded together with survey bills and future deeds drawn by them. If part of a lot is sold, it should certainly be surveyed first. It is a lasting satisfaction to know your each and every well-marked corner. To see your spotted lines, and particularly to have an accurate map of your land. When you come to sell your property, its value is sure to be increased, for you can show the buyer he is purchasing something definite and not a pig in a poke. Good boundaries not only make good neighbors, they make value.

Good boundaries not only make good neighbors, they make value.

Kenneth Andler, 1904 to 1994.